Senior year in high school, so we’re talking the fall of 1992, bumper stickers for The Final Cut’s album Consumed began to appear all over my friend Brian’s house. They worked their way through our group of friends and eventually you saw them everywhere: school, other people’s houses, bumpers, the walls at the local burger king where people hung out after school. Everywhere. It was the best example of sticker-based marketing I’ve still ever seen, and all from a band that chances are, few people remember today.

In a few days the first episode of my new podcast will drop. The Horror Vision is a four-man discussion on all things horror, where my friends Ray, Anthony, Chris and employ a round-table, informal setting to wax philosophical on a featured movie every month. The format of the show will come into its own eventually, but for the moment we’ll begin each episode with a catch-up, spoiler-free discussion on anything we’ve seen since the last episode that we want to tell people about, and then move into the featured film, where spoilers will not be a consideration. For the first episode, which we recorded last Sunday and which should hopefully go up on our forthcoming website and iTunes tomorrow, we chose Benson and Moorehead’s The Endless. While we wait for that to drop, I’ve been thinking. I’ve started watching a lot of movies again, and I wanted to have a place to discuss them. I also wanted to start a new column on Joup since my previous one ended, so I figured, why not combine both? So welcome to the inaugural installment of The Horror Vision: The Column.

I have a new director who, in three films, has planted himself in my favorites category. Richard Bates, Jr. Man! This guy’s films are fantastic – funny, uncomfortable, disturbing and sometimes horrific, Mr. Bates really knocks it out of the park with Suburban Gothic and Trash Fire, the two films I had seen previously (the former is on Prime, the latter Netflix). Then, a couple of nights ago I got around to the film of his I’d been saving since I discovered it on Shudder: Excision.

And, as with all good things, we come to an end. My end with this particular column, at least. I’m hoping the future for Drinking, Fighting, F*&king, and Crying will unfold in an irregular but enthusiastic embracing by my fellow Jouptonians, and every now and again (or as often as anyone wants) a column pops up under this banner, no order to the choice of the four subjects necessary. As with everything on this site, write what moves you at the moment; if we see twelve drinking columns in a row, so be it! Nine crying posts? Good! For now though, let’s go into the final Cry.

Loveage: Songs to Make Love To Your Old Lady By purports, in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way, to be a sonic aphrodisiac. The entire tableaux around which this Dan the Automator-conceived and produced, trip-hop masterpiece is built is so thorough, so painstakingly thought out, that when I saw them live in early 2002, Nakamura (The Automator’s real name) and Mike Patton wore smoking jackets and Jennifer Charles wore a slip.

1999. Schlitz Family Robinson had died at least a year before, and Mr. Brown and I were trying to make it work with new people. I did a brief stint in Grez and Sonny’s follow-up project, The Harlem Circus (later The Harlem Circuit), but I wasn’t feeling it. I played one show with those guys and went back to recording odd 4-track music with Brown. Then an old friend, Jason Wayne Sneed, called me up out of the blue. He’d started a project with Mike Pearson of the Blue Meanies and a drummer named Dave. Pearson had left, and they needed a guitar player and a singer. Brown. Baker. Sneed. Dave. Universal Product was born.

“After the shower I got dressed up nice to go out; Nichola and I were supposed to go to The Kitchen (U2’s club), to meet up with Joe and Tony. Nichola was still doing her make-up when I heard a knock at the door.

This is where shit got interesting.

Something about the knock put me on high alert. There was something malevolent about it. Maybe I’m imaging that now, I don’t know, but there was a feeling that came with that knock. And when Mrs. Ryan answered the door and I heard a voice say, ‘I’m looking for my sister, she’s staying here with two Americans,.’ I froze.”